White Stoat Green Grass

Through February, I’ve been watching a most beautiful ermine, white stoat, visiting our garden. Talk about sore thumbs, the poor stoat is so obvious in a landscape lacking snow.  Long ago I remember winters with snow cover from November to mid March, when ermine were in their element.  This year the grass is growing long enough to harvest for my eight year old daughter’s guinea pigs.  Not surprising since there has been a series of beautiful sunny days since the New Year, in fact better than last summer!

I’ve been trying to photograph the stoat and finally managed the other day, albeit a long distance shot because just when I thought I’d get a close photo a wood lorry sent it scuttling over the bank. The other morning I saw a weasel darting across the garden, but then I’ve spent more time gazing out the window as I rest after an operation. It’s also given me time to read and think.

One thing that caught my mind in the papers was a forward look, by a Microsoft think tank, at jobs our children will be doing in ten years time. One of the ten “new jobs” was ‘Rewilding Strategist’. Good to see the need for ecosystem recovery being mainstream, but surely we should be doing that now rather than wait. And some of us could say “isn’t that what we are doing now!” But then may be it’s because we don’t call ourselves a “Strategist”. Oh well, I better redo my CV.

One book I’ve really enjoyed was The Neanderthals Rediscovered – a really fascinating read about them and our ancestors. It added ancient history to my two beautiful prehistoric stone axes, I found when a teenager birding along the Solent coast. Although in my work of restoring species and ecosystems, the problems are usually to do with modern human exploitation and damage, I’ve always been fascinated by our original role within natural ecosystems. For most of our history on earth, we’ve just been a very efficient apex predator in nature; the tipping point to becoming over-dominant is relatively recent. So can we and should we try to emulate our original role?

Yesterday I read an article in the Guardian magazine about the ‘wolf problem’ in Finland and the arguments about how many wolves there should be. Some say there are far too many and others say they have a right to be there and we should leave them alone. But it’s incorrect to think that 20,000 years ago we ‘left them alone’, the difference is that when numbers were high we threw spears and rocks at them, and hunted their young for furs, and when numbers were low it was not worth the effort. A sort of natural system, unlike the recent millennium with metal traps and poisons, and high powered rifles.

It’s very encouraging that conservation and legal protection can restore species, even the big predators in Europe, but what if our efforts are so successful that they may cause threats to other species or rural people. The ‘Rewilding Strategist’ is going to have to learn how to regulate species that boom in present day conditions to the detriment of others. Where I live in northern Scotland, the middle-guild predators, fox, badger, marten and otter, are thriving under societal changes and/or legal protection, and in the absence of the top predators like lynx, wolf and bear there are few natural checks on numbers.  As a great supporter of restoring species I can see the dilemmas ahead. I want to see beavers restored over much larger areas and the lynx brought back home, but I also recognise the need for robust management. To me the conservation of the species, as a whole, in as big a range as possible is more important that the conservation of an individual of the species. We are in interesting and challenging times, but the important thrust is to massively increase the areas of natural ecosystems.